20190726T090020190726T1145Europe/AmsterdamThe Epistemology of the “Match”
"It's a match!" To date, the phones of 91 million persons around the globe have already buzzed with these words – the opening salvos of courtship in the world of online dating. Yet what, precisely, is a "match"? Behind the multi-billion-dollar dating industry stand programmers and statisticians seeking to bring, in the words of OkCupid's Christian Rudder, "mathematically-minded … analysis and rigor to what had historically been the domain of love 'experts' and grinning warlocks like Dr. Phil." Far from a hot-headed discourse of the passions, the "match" is about cool-headed engineering: the concepts and practices for sorting personal information and targeting individuals from among larger populations. The history of the "match" is a history of knowledge. Elena Serrano examines how early-eighteenth-century theories of the female body taught men to distinguish, from outward traits and gestures, between "physical" and "moral" love. Carla Bittel uncovers the role of phrenologists as experts in the marital marketplace, detailing the creation of cranial "profiles" to aid in selecting partners. Hansun Hsiung explores Charles Fourier's "calculus of passions," asking why the mathematization of partnership formed an essential component of utopian socialism. Erika Milam traces how the evolutionary study of same-sex behavior in animals initially naturalized heterosexual courtship norms but transformed into a defense of gay rights. From the eighteenth century through the twentieth, from humoral medicine and phrenology to mathematics and evolutionary biology, this panel explores the shifting sciences that have promised solutions to courtship, guaranteeing the "congeniality" and "harmony" of partners' bodies and minds.
Organized by Hansun Hsiu ...
Janskerkhof 2-3, Rm. 013History of Science Society 2019meeting@hssonline.org
"It's a match!" To date, the phones of 91 million persons around the globe have already buzzed with these words – the opening salvos of courtship in the world of online dating. Yet what, precisely, is a "match"? Behind the multi-billion-dollar dating industry stand programmers and statisticians seeking to bring, in the words of OkCupid's Christian Rudder, "mathematically-minded … analysis and rigor to what had historically been the domain of love 'experts' and grinning warlocks like Dr. Phil." Far from a hot-headed discourse of the passions, the "match" is about cool-headed engineering: the concepts and practices for sorting personal information and targeting individuals from among larger populations. The history of the "match" is a history of knowledge. Elena Serrano examines how early-eighteenth-century theories of the female body taught men to distinguish, from outward traits and gestures, between "physical" and "moral" love. Carla Bittel uncovers the role of phrenologists as experts in the marital marketplace, detailing the creation of cranial "profiles" to aid in selecting partners. Hansun Hsiung explores Charles Fourier's "calculus of passions," asking why the mathematization of partnership formed an essential component of utopian socialism. Erika Milam traces how the evolutionary study of same-sex behavior in animals initially naturalized heterosexual courtship norms but transformed into a defense of gay rights. From the eighteenth century through the twentieth, from humoral medicine and phrenology to mathematics and evolutionary biology, this panel explores the shifting sciences that have promised solutions to courtship, guaranteeing the "congeniality" and "harmony" of partners' bodies and minds.
Organized by Hansun Hsiung and Elena Serrano Sponsored by the Forum for the History of the Human Sciences
Cranial Compatibility: Phrenology, Measurement, and Marriage AssessmentView Abstract Organized SessionMedicine and Health09:00 AM - 09:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/26 07:00:00 UTC - 2019/07/26 07:30:00 UTC
This paper demonstrates how phrenological tools of character assessment were used to measure marriage compatibility in the nineteenth century. It will examine how the knowledge and practices of cranial measurement produced character “profiles" for the purpose of judging suitable marriage partners. A popular but contested science of the mind, phrenology articulated a relationship between the mental and the physical, and maintained that one could truly know others and oneself through measuring “organs” of the mind, or protrusions on the skull. While much has been written about phrenology, less attention has been paid to its focus on marriage, mating and motherhood, and how its epistemic practices supported a model of courtship based on numerical and empirical assessment of gendered and racialized character traits. Focused on the North American context, this paper will use phrenological materials -- advice literature, personalized charts, photographs, mail order submissions and testimonials -- to illustrate how phrenology packaged cranial knowledge, promoting it as superior to other forms of matching. Many “practical” phrenologists claimed expertise on marital harmony, and sold their analyses as more accurate and reliable than personal experience or familial knowledge. Many consumers pursued this knowledge, hoping to find a partner with compatible crania, but more often to assess themselves and the fitness of a current suitor or spouse. Ultimately, this paper will show that notions of race and gender, heredity, and sexual “relations" were embedded in the shorthand of phrenological measurements.
Between Harmony and E-Harmony: Sexual Minima and Utopian Matching in Fourier’s "Calculus of Passions"View Abstract Organized SessionMathematics09:30 AM - 10:00 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/26 07:30:00 UTC - 2019/07/26 08:00:00 UTC
In his manuscript of 1818 entitled “System of radical sympathies and antipathies,” Charles Fourier claimed to have devised “the art...of finding all those persons with whom one is in complete sympathy, and of surrounding oneself with them instantly and constantly.” Unfolding across 117 pages the “algebraic formulas” that would allow for this “matching [assortiment] of characters,” Fourier argued that a “calculus of passions” was key to the management of relations in his phalanstères -- communities dubbed simply “Harmony” by Fourier, and envisioned as a socialist solution to the woes of capitalist “civilization.” Whereas, in “civilization,” persons “often spend years in a city without encountering sympathetic partners in love,” in “Harmony,” “no one would be left out or miss out on an appropriate match.” This paper unpacks the political stakes, informational processes, and mathematical techniques of Fourier’s “calculus of passions,” to argue that so-called “utopian” socialism in part pioneered the discourses and practices of “matching” behind contemporary data-driven approaches to finding “matches.” As a self-styled Newton of the social world, Fourier championed the need to discover laws of “passionate attraction” analogous to universal gravitation. As an early critic of industrial capitalism, Fourier proposed that “free love” required scientific management, lest it degenerate into an unequal free market of love. Technologies of matching, in this sense, went hand-in-hand with his problematic demand for the right to a “sexual minimum” alongside universal basic income, and his faith that this minimum, through proper practices of information collection and analysis, was an achievable reality.
Hansun Hsiung Max Planck Institute For The History Of Science / Durham University
Animals as Evolutionary Models of Human Sexuality in the Late 20th CenturyView Abstract Organized SessionBiology10:15 AM - 10:45 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/26 08:15:00 UTC - 2019/07/26 08:45:00 UTC
How evolutionary biologists have defined animal courtship has had profound consequences for their understanding of how Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection might operate among humans. One of the most remarkable applications of evolutionary logic to human behavior came from Donald Symons’ Evolution of Sexuality, published in 1979. If male and female heterosexual reproductive strategies fundamentally differed, then Symons reasoned that every sexual encounter between a man and a woman represented a compromise between their dueling desires and agendas. How best, then, to understand true male behavioral patterns? In matches unfettered by female reluctance. For Symons the frequency of homosexual encounters was the best yardstick by which to measure normative heterosexual desire. His account reinforced gendered stereotypes already inscribed in sociobiology: males possessed a greater sex drive than females, derived from the evolutionary importance of male sexual pleasure. Critical of this argument, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy pushed back by suggesting the variety of female-female sexual encounters in primates provided robust evidence of sexual drive in all females. This paper explores these debates and subsequent transformations in late-20th-century evolutionary accounts of the match. What began as a means of naturalizing heterosexual courtship norms would eventually transform into a potential defense of gay rights as biologists documented numerous examples of same-sex behavior in animals. As a result, the logic of using any one animal as a model of human courtship gave way to seeing human sexuality as reflected in the wide diversity of sexualities found in the animal kingdom as a whole.
Looking for Moral Congeniality: Lust, Love, and Physical Bodies in Eighteenth-Century SpainView Abstract Organized SessionMedicine and Health10:45 AM - 11:15 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/26 08:45:00 UTC - 2019/07/26 09:15:00 UTC
In 1726, the Spanish Benedictine friar Benito J. Feijoo (1676-1764), in his best-seller Teatro Crítico Universal, defended women’s intellectual capacities. Analysing medical and philosophical theories about how ideas were produced, he argued that female bodies (cold and humid) were perfectly suited to intellectual pursuits. Feijoo’s ultimate goal in demonstrating the equality of sexes was moral. By championing women’s mental capacities, he sought to prevent male sexual attacks, and buttress the bond of marriage. Specifically, Feijoo was one of many during his time who advocated that spouses needed to be morally 'congenial' (congeniar) for a successful marriage. To achieve such 'congeniality,' however, one had to discern a potential lover’s moral characteristics from her external traits and gestures. This paper traces the shifting somatic understandings underpinning such an amorous hermeneutics, excavating the relationship between love, desire and physical bodies in 18th-century Spain. In particular, the paper addresses the rise of medical interest in erotic and pornographic representations. Across anatomical and medical treatises -- yet also disguised in painters’ manuals, guides to conduct, marital and moral-philosophical works, and novels -- sensual paintings and erotic descriptions were analyzed for the different ways in which they both produced bodily effects (e.g., sexual arousal), as well as excited ‘higher’ sentiments (e.g., ‘moral love’). In turn, these analyses were used to instruct potential lovers in Catholic Spain as to how they might interpret visual features and performances so as to successfully distinguish between ‘physical love’ and ‘moral love’, avoiding a marriage premised on false appearances.
Elena Serrano Max Planck Institute For The History Of Science, Berlin
Commentary: The Epistemology of the “Match”View Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science11:15 AM - 11:45 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/26 09:15:00 UTC - 2019/07/26 09:45:00 UTC
Dan Bouk